Veni, Vidi, Scripsi

Daily Archives: September 16, 2013

I remember being in 8th grade and the class being assigned a project about careers. It was a standard assignment and the library had all sorts of government produced information about various careers, what education you needed to get into the right path, and how much they paid.

As 13 year old boys are wont to do, we tended to fixate on what seemed cool and what paid well. Plenty of potential astronauts were recruited in that project. I recall my own plan being to go to the Air Force Academy, then to flight school. I’d fly something cool. I liked the idea of the newly-in-service A-10 at the time. Then I would retire from the Air Force and become an airline pilot and live the good life, well paid and respected.

Not an impossible dream. A friend up the street did pretty much exactly that. But a few weeks after that report was turned in, we got to go to the brand new lab that Apple, just down the street, donated to the school. It consisted of maybe half a dozen straight-up Apple II computers complete with monitor and cassette tape storage. I had no idea how much a career in computers would pay, but I was on that path from there forward.

Still, I remember wondering what life would be like if I made as much money as some of the careers I read about. Certainly if you had told 13 year old me how much money I would make as an adult in Silicon Valley, I would have assumed I would be living in a mansion, with an expansive car or two in the driveway, rich beyond cares.